Inspiring talk: the mini festival that urges you to do it

What do an Amazon explorer, the maker of everlasting cars and the creator of the world wide web have in common? They've all gathered in a circle of teepees in Wales to inspire others to do amazing things

Ed Stafford, who walked the length of the Amazon, at the Do Lectures festival site in west Wales. Photograph: Gareth Phillips for the Guardian

Not for the first time, I'm lying in bed overcome by a sense of inadequacy. This is partly because I have brought a sleeping bag that is functionally useless in the 4am late-September chill of my tent. Despite wearing two hats, all my clothes and walking boots, I'm freezing. Maybe if I turned on my laptop and folded it over my chest, that would help. I am considering tearing up my paperback and stuffing it down my trousers like some literary thermal codpiece.

Instead, I get up and walk to the toilet block. That only makes the feelings of inadequacy worse. Around me, I hear the snoring of some of the world's leading geniuses, adventurers and innovative entrepreneurs who have come to this beautiful corner of west Wales for a weekend event called the Do Lectures 2010. In a tent over there sleeps Ed Stafford, the ex-British army captain who dodged arrows and machetes to become the first human to hike the length of the Amazon from source to shining sea. There's sleeping Jay Rogers, the CEO of Local Motors, who aims to make cars that last so long that they become family heirlooms. Oh yes, and over there dozes Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the world wide web.

The point of this weekend is to galvanise everybody involved, even self-pitying baldsters like me, to do more than whine. "We set up the Do Lectures because I like ideas and if we share ideas enough we can accelerate change," says David Hieatt who, with his wife Clare, four years ago launched an annual speaking event in these very woods, originally called Little Big Voice. For the last three years, these have been known as the Do Lectures and take place two miles south of Cardigan in the Fforest campsite of their friend James Lynch. The blurb says: "The idea is a simple one: that people who Do amazing things can inspire the rest of us to go and do amazing things too."

The Do Lectures weekend is an intimate, homespun affair. It takes place on a former chicken farm. There are lectures in a rustic teepee, acoustic sets around the campfire, a scramble over dinner for the vegan beetroot option, and a long wait in the morning queue for the showers. I missed the jam-making and bakery workshops, as well as the guided walk through the woods to hone my biomimicry skills (no, I'm not sure what that means either), but many participants dutifully attend all of them. They are here, after all, not just to listen. They are here to get inspired and to do.

The Hieatts are unlikely people to run this lecture series. David is an ex ad-man who, in 1995, set up Howies, an award-winning sports clothing company. The business was so successful that they were able to make a long-sought move from London to west Wales a few years ago. More recently, Howies has been bought by Timberland. Last year the Hieatts left the company.

For the time being they are concentrating on running the lectures. What's their point? "The notion of the man in the shed having a eureka moment is not what really happens," says David. "I want these talks to be watched a million times online. I want this to be an event which gives a eureka moment to 1 million people. What really happens and has always happened in innovation is about the power of many. You can harness that on the internet. "

Coincidentally, these ideas are explored in a new book about the nature of innovation. Steven Johnson, author of the bestseller Everything Bad Is Good for You, has written Where Good Ideas Comes From, arguing that radical innovation is made more likely when exhilarating doers from several disciplines hang out together, serendipitously influencing each other. Johnson's book could serve as a manual for the Do Lectures.

In the teepee, I hear my first lecture. Conservationist and social entrepreneur Alasdair Harris is haranguing a 100-strong audience from his lectern (a sawn-up tree trunk) with an all-too-plausible dystopian vision of fishing. By 2012, the blue-fin tuna will be extinct. By 2048, commercial fishing will be over. Britain and Europe's fishing policies are premised on ignoring these truths and subsidising ever-deeper trawls into the oceans for what weirdo species remain. Harris counsels that we Europeans should stop this madness and learn from Madagascar's Vezu people. These fishing communities have, under the guidance of Harris's Blue Ventures marine conservation organisation, temporarily stopped fishing on sustainability grounds.

David and Clare Hieatt, founders of the Do Lectures. Photograph: Gareth Phillips for the Guardian

Each speaker has to conclude their talk with a "Big Do" – a practical notion that the audience could take away and enact. Harris asks us to eschew cod and chips and sushi. "None of us would suffer in the west by giving up fish," he says. "That's not the case in the developing world, but to what extent do we here need to maintain the flow of fish to our table?"

Next up is former US marine Jay Rogers, billed as a 21st-century Henry Ford. "We make it fun to own a car," says the CEO of Local Motors. He claims to do this by encouraging customers to design and contribute to the building of customised, low-emission, fuel-efficient cars at micro-factories dotted around the US. He reckons the company can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes traditional car manufacturers to change the specs on door trim. "My vision of a car company was not to make cars that become obsolete. It's one where parts get reused and the cars will be driven by the original customers' grandchildren. The obsolescence of our business is part of what we have planned." You hope Rogers didn't tell his bank manager that.

It's dusk outside the teepee when I interview Maggie Doyne, whose talk earlier in the day left many in tears. During her gap year, Doyne went to war-torn Nepal and found a phenomenon that changed her life: hundreds of orphaned children who didn't have the basics to live on. Suddenly, going on to university as planned seemed ludicrous. "I remember looking into the eyes of this girl aged 12 and I saw myself 10 years before with the world of opportunities before me. She had nothing and nothing to look forward to. I thought: Is this really what the world is like? Like, what the heck – is this a joke?"

What Maggie did was to go home and raise funds ("including my $5,000 life savings") in order to build with local people the Kopila Valley Children's Home in a remote part of Nepal ravaged by Maoist insurrection. She now lives there with 30 children, the youngest of whom is two, and runs a school for 200 children. She learned Nepalese, integrated herself into the community and, three years on, lives there without (so far) a significant other. "There'll be time for that," she says.

"My aim is that every child has a safe home, decent education and medical care." But she is trying to overturn something more entrenched than war's ravages: "I don't know a woman in my village who can write or add up. Women are held down from the get go. That can't continue. What I do is a drop in the ocean, but it might serve as a model." Doyne wanders off for supper. Truly, I have looked on the face of youthful idealism and found myself wanting.

That said, there is such a thing as being too exposed to inspiring people, so I head off to the onsite pub hoping to find a fellow underachiever for a quiet drink. The man I start talking to, though, has just come home after cycling around the coast of Ireland. The year before, he rode around the coast of Britain. Is there no one on this campsite without a stirring tale of achievement to reinforce my inadequacy? It's a rhetorical question.

In a nearby field, there is a bonfire ringed by earnest people discussing today's lectures. "So I should really give up sushi," says one bloke to his girlfriend. "But," she replies, "think of the livelihoods of fishing communities, especially those from the developing world." "But haven't they got to stop fishing so species don't become extinct?" "Maybe it's not that simple." Sheez, I think, lighten up.

Nearby, an old mobile library van has been converted to provide the night's entertainment. Inside, Heavenly Records boss Jeff Barrett is at the decks before one of the world's smallest dance floors – the library's former reading area. More bad news for underachievers: twentysomething geeks can throw some excellent shapes, damn them.

The following morning, I settle down in the communal breakfast hall with David Spiegelhalter, Cambridge professor of the public understanding of risk. He is very exercised by the story of the Lincolnshire dad who was reprimanded by the local authority for allowing his seven-year-old daughter to walk 20m from her home, across a road, to get a school bus. He cites the story as showing how risk-averse social policies thwart rather than protect our children. "Going to school should be an adventure," he argues.

The day's first lecture is delivered by Tim Berners-Lee. If only the awe in the teepee could be harnessed for public good in some way. "I am a geek, by the way," he tells his audience, "and proud of it." Cue whoops from the like-minded. Who has ever written a computer program? Very few hands go up. Berners-Lee looks sad. "But programming computers is really very creative and what's disappointing is that kids at school tend to see computers like a fridge," he says. More depressing for him is that only 20% of the world's population use his invention. One of the aims of his World Wide Web Consortium is to get the remaining 80% connected. One questioner suggests this would destroy older, purer ways of being.

The eclectic itinerary of events at the Do Lectures. Photograph: Gareth Phillips for the Guardian

Later, I tell Berners-Lee he crops up in Steven Johnson's book as an example of a scientist whose innovation was based on a slow-developing hunch and on being connected, when he worked at CERN, to other clever people from different disciplines, and that, most importantly, he was working in a not-for-profit network where ideas are freely exchanged – ideal circumstances for innovation. "That's all probably right – there was no eureka moment, even though I know journalists want there to have been."

Isn't that very similar to what the Do Lectures should ideally, erm, do? "Well, having people from different disciplines criss-crossing each other here can be inspiring," he says. "But what really stimulates me is being in this beautiful rural environment."

Berners-Lee is followed to the teepee lecture stump by Ed Stafford, who five weeks ago completed a two-and-a-half-year walk down the Amazon from source to sea. It's an amazing story of cheating violent death, as well as the manly struggle to get online in the jungle. "Don't be afraid of taking risks," he says. "Don't listen to negative people. Don't be afraid. If you're positive and visualise you can really achieve your dreams." The audience has its collective head down, taking notes.

This theme is echoed by Daniel Seddiqui, who left home to do 50 different jobs over 50 weeks in each of the US's 50 states. He married a couple in Las Vegas ("not sure if they're still together") and was a stiltwalker at Florida's Universal Studios. "In California, I was living in a bubble," he says. "My project was about going outside my comfort zone and taking risks." Words to warm the cockles of Prof Spiegelhalter's heart. Seddiqui's Big Do? "Find something that's worth pursuing and go for it." Small do? "Finish what you start." The audience furiously takes notes again.

It's nearly time for me to leave. But before I do I hear Craig Mods, a vexingly smart and irritatingly young publisher and writer, on what digital technology will do to the book. Mods explains by telling his own story. A few years ago, he published a lavishly illustrated guidebook called Art Space Tokyo. When the original print run sold out last spring, he considered his options: "The national distributors were saying you have to price this niche book at mass-market rates." That meant selling his book for $29.50, which he thought was ludicrously cheap.

Instead, he decided to fund and distribute another run himself using Kickstarter, a website that facilitates the microfinancing of creative projects. Anyone who pledged him $25 received a pdf edition and access to all updates to the book; those who pledged $65 received a hardback book as well as a pdf and access to updates; those pledging $850 or more received a signed original drawing by a Japanese artist too.

By May this year, 265 backers had pledged $23,790 – nearly $9,000 more than Mods sought. With the proceeds, he bankrolled a new print run. He also funded iPad and pdf editions – both of which he can regularly update. His story hardly implies the book is dead: rather, it suggests that the future publishing ecology may feature fewer but better made books and that we will use digital technology to develop currently unforseen ways of reading. iPads and Kindles will, he thinks, doom paperbacks to extinction, but that is no bad thing. Maybe I should have torn up that paperback and stuffed it in my trousers for warmth last night after all.

I find Mods's speech especially inspiring since it envisages publishing as sidestepping the whims of an innovation-averse industry, still less as something to be subsumed entirely by Steve Jobs's empire. It offers, as the best of these Do Lectures have done, a suggestion of how you can be the change in your own life, and a bracing challenge to those of us who spend too much time in bed feeling inadequate. This year I leave feeling inspired. Next year I'll bring a better sleeping bag.